Where Islam spreads, freedom dies

One of the spooky things about reading Breivik's book is how ordinary he seems in many respects. It seems somehow surreal that he was playing games, like World of Warcraft, while actively preparing for his killing spree.

I took a year off when I was 25 and played WoW PvE hardcore for a year.Conservatism - Alliance, human female mage – PvE, Server: SilvermoonConservative - Horde, tauren female resto druid – PvP, Server: SilvermoonI raided hardcore and was a guild leader in a couple of hardcore guilds: Virtue, then Unit,Nordrassil – Rank 1 Alliance PvE. We transferred the guild to Silvermoon. I grew tired of running the guild and sorting recruitment issues so I joined Nevermore, another hardcore guild on Silvermoon (Rank 3). Silvermoon is the most progressed Alliance server in the world out of more than 300 servers (10 million + players worldwide) so the competition is extremely hard. This means we were one of the most progressed guilds in the world at one time. I can honestly say running a hardcore WoW guild is equally challenging to running your own business with 7 employees or more. It requires an extreme amount of work in order to be successful and get server first kills.

I was gobsmacked when I read this because I used to play on this server myself when I played World of Warcraft. At that time, there were five high-level raid guilds on the server, one of which I was in (Genesis). Unit, which Breivik apparently led at some stage (although I cannot remember his characters specifically or whether he was leader at the time I played there), was one of the others. This is blackly hilarious to me because in Genesis we used to joke that Unit was a "Nazi guild". Even though its game progression was about the same as ours (Genesis and Unit were about the 4th and 5th best guilds on the server), it was perceived as having a "Nazi ethos" because its leadership was ultra-strict. Then its leader turns out to be a mass murderer!

Blizzard seems to have deleted Breivik's two characters, Conservatism and Conservative, because they no longer show up in the Armoury (a section of their website that allows you to view all registered characters and guilds). The names are picked up in searches but if you click on the links (shown below) you get the image shown at the top.

His characters do show up in the independent WarcraftRealms database that tracks character progression, however.

Because Andersnordic is a mage, like Conservatism, it is almost certainly the same character as Conservatism. He probably just changed the name. It would make no sense to level up two characters of the same class on the same faction on the same server. In fact, both Conservative and Conservatism were almost certainly both renamed characters because they blink into existence at level 80. We don't know what the name of his druid character Conservative was before he renamed it.

From the WarcraftRealms data, it is clear he was actively playing World of Warcraft until late January of this year.

There are still a few contributions from Breivik in the Silvermoon realm forum. One of these is in a "Get-to-know-you" thread in which he posts and declares he is "Conservatism (Andersnordic), 31, Norway, Oslo".

Unit had a long history, it was formally called Iratus Lepus. I was a member in both guilds and Brevik had little influence when I was there. I left at the start of TBC. Unit was never a Nazi guild and I used to do bg's with Brevik, who was called Andersnordic then and he seemed a nice quiet person o.0 Maybe Unit changed but it was a fun guild in vanilla. Certainly not a Nazi guild lol.